Businesses today increasingly need to leverage a unified database platform to enable the deployment and consolidation of all their applications onto one common infrastructure. Whether supporting OLTP, DW or mixed workloads, a common infrastructure delivers the efficiencies and reusability the data center needs — and provides the reality of cloud computing in-house. This white paper examines how the Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server allows companies to accelerate database performance, handle change and growth in scalable and incremental steps, and deliver mission-critical data availability and protection.